Web vs. Mobile development. Which should you learn?

yo what's going on guys in today's video i wanted to talk about mobile versus web development uh maybe you're considering doing one or the other so i want to talk about which one would be a better choice for you for your career as a programmer so we're going to talk about that and for the record i've done both in my career um currently i am a mobile developer but i'll be able to give you my own personal opinion there and i'm not only interested in giving you my personal opinion i want to provide you with some data that i've put together based on my own research so i kind of want to break this down into three categories um that's going to be compensation demand and learning curve so there's a few websites i want to look at that give us developer salaries the first one i want to look at here is indeed so indeed has web devs making an average salary of about 78k a year whereas mobile devs make an average salary of about 123k a year so pretty big difference they're pretty big gap in salary i don't know how accurate this is um so before you start learning mobile development because of the six figure salary let's take a look at a couple other sources okay so from glassdoor we have an average salary for web devs to be about 69k a year versus mobile at about 98k a year so that actually sounds a lot more right in my opinion and in my uh experience so smaller amount for both options but the trend still stands that mobile devs tend to earn more okay and the last one i want to look at here is pay scale pay scale shows web devs making about 60k a year versus mobile at 73k a year if we take all three of these sites we'll see that the average for a web dev comes out to be about 70k a year versus mobile sitting at 98k a year so salary is is very important when considering a job to be honest i i feel like a web developer might be a little low here but um i would say on average you know this is pretty much true at least in my experience mobile devs are going to make more than web devs and i think a big reason for that is because mobile devs they're kind of hard to come by um at least in my experience every single job that i've had where we've put out a mobile developer job posting we've had a little bit of trouble filling those roles so this kind of leads me into my next point which is demand so if we're talking about in the united states according to the u.s bureau of labor and statistics the projected growth for web developers is about uh eight percent through 2029 as you can see they also have this marked in uh parentheses that this is much faster than average which i would tend to agree now as a whole the us bureau has software developers projected to grow at 22 so i'm not entirely sure if software developers encompasses uh web developers according to the us bureau of labor and statistics but i would assume so right so eight percent growth in the next 10 years and i would say that's pretty good right um i don't think that's anything too crazy but i definitely think there there is a growing demand for web developers and i don't think you'll have any problem finding a job if you choose uh the path of becoming a web developer at least specialize in web development so now let's uh let's quickly talk about the demand for mobile devs and to be honest uh finding a reliable resource for the demand of mobile devs was a bit tricky but i did find this survey on stack overflow that asks developers what they do for a living so looking at this chart you see there's a large subset of devs doing web related work right we have back end devs at 55 full stack at 54 in front and at 37 but if we look at mobile we see that there's only about 19 percent of of devs doing mobile work which means the mobile dev market is a lot smaller compared to the mobile or i'm sorry compared to the web development market right now depending on how you look at it this could mean a good thing or it could mean a bad thing the way you could view this as bad is you'll probably have a lot harder time coming over mobile dev job postings and mobile dev work versus uh web dev where you'll probably have a lot easier time finding that kind of related work which is something that i've personally experienced right but we'll get into that a little later but the way that this could be good right is the fact that mobile is very niche meaning there's not as many people in the world equipped with the skill set to do mobile development i personally think this is a good thing and here's why web development tends to be the more saturated realm of software development not saying that you can't make a good career out of web development because you most definitely can but as a whole web development tends to be more saturated okay i think there's a couple reasons for that the first being is like the web is huge right there's a lot of systems that need support from the likes of web developers so naturally when first starting your career as a programmer you're going to trend towards web development just because the amount of support needed there for uh back-end systems front-end websites so on and so forth another thing too and this is purely speculation i don't have any like facts or statistics to back this up but code bootcamps seem to be pumping out web devs left and right and another thing too is when people are first getting into programming right they want to teach themselves how to code most of the resources they find online are going to point at or hint at them learning web development for example if you go to youtube and you type like top five programming languages to learn you're probably gonna see python and javascript and both of those are web development languages okay now take that with a grain of salt okay uh i do think web development is is a little a bit more saturated versus mobile development but again i don't think you'll have any problem in starting a career as a web developer now with that being said mobile development tends to be a pretty niche market okay so what does that mean well although the demand is high for mobile developers and companies often struggle to find mobile developers the companies that are actually looking for mobile work are much more slim than the companies looking for web work mobile is weird man because while there aren't as many companies looking for mobile devs in comparison to companies looking for web devs the companies that are looking for mobile devs tend to struggle a tad bit when it comes to finding a good candidate so this has been my experience okay every company that i've worked for has had i guess a lack of options when trying to fill mobile work there's just not a lot of competition there in terms of the applicants applying for jobs but i only find this true for bigger cities right so let me tell you my own story real quick i lived in a smaller city in michigan and when it came time to find mobile work i really struggled with finding local work right every job posting was in bigger metropolitan areas like detroit or chicago so for me to actually find good mobile work i had to move to a bigger city which is why i am where i am right now but when i got here i found a job rather quickly because like i said the companies looking for mobile devs struggle to find mobile devs and because of that the pay is a lot more competitive but for web developers right you probably won't have to move okay because there's a ton of local web development work everywhere like i said web development is huge but on the flip side of that you'll probably have a little bit more competition so you'll really have to do do what you can to stand out from all the other applicants so key points to take away here web development tends to be more saturated uh meaning more competition overall right not not overly saturated but more saturated in comparison to mobile devs but with that being said you probably won't have any problem coming across a job posting or finding local work in relationship to web developer work okay and the next key point is mobile development tends to be more niche meaning it can be a lot more difficult to find mobile work but if you're willing to relocate you'll have a much easier time finding a job in my opinion all right so now that we've talked about demand a little bit there's one more point i want to hit on and that is learning curve so learning programming in general usually takes a long time right and if you're just starting out and you're trying to learn web development you're probably going to have to learn uh both front end and back end development if you want to have a successful career in that field this means you'll have to learn multiple languages right and you'll have to learn the concept of writing server side and client-side code you'll have to learn languages like html css javascript python possibly php and you'll have to learn frameworks such as react angular and node.js possibly there definitely seems like a lot there whereas for mobile development you're gonna either pick android or ios and you'll learn one language it's going to be kotlin for android or swift for ios and you'll work in either android studio or xcode which will provide you with all the resources necessary for making a mobile app right out of the box so if we compare uh let's say android development to web development logically you'll have less to learn right so in theory android development would be easier to learn well not really okay so here's the thing with mobile development at some point you're going to have to get familiar with some concepts and principles of web development okay there's a lot of overlap between mobile development and web development you'll have to learn how to interface with like back-end and apis and databases and stuff like that so at a minimum if you choose to be a mobile developer without any web development experience you'll have to at least be familiar with web development concepts but if we're just talking straight learning okay like you have zero knowledge of programming and you wanna figure out uh what's the best route to start i think starting with mobile i it is a great way to learn to just kick start that that learning okay you'll get very familiar with either kotlin or swift which are both you know exceptional languages in my opinion to learn object oriented programming which is a non non-negotiable skill set to have when uh becoming a software developer so if we're just talking about learning i think uh starting off with mobile perfectly fine way to go but just remember if you want to turn mobile development into a career you will have to learn uh web development at least be familiar with with some concepts of web development at some point okay so here's the bottom line here's the million dollar question um what's the better choice personally i think mobile is just because it's more niche i see that as a huge benefit but again you may not and i totally understand if you may not see that as a benefit but really quick let's hit on uh some pros and cons that i wrote down for for both mobile and web okay so the first one uh for mobile is they tend to make more money okay so we saw that in the beginning when we compared salaries mobile devs 10 on average to earn a little bit more money so another point is that mobile development tends to be niche so you can see this as a positive or negative um i see it as a positive i see how people could see it as a negative i'm going to put this as a neutral both pro and a con i guess so big con in my opinion is it's a lot harder to find local mobile work okay but on the flip side of that if you are willing to move to a metropolitan area a big city or just willing to relocate in general you will have a much easier time when finding mobile work so now the pros and cons of web development um a con i guess is less money as we saw web developers make a little less money than mobile developers but a huge pro is that there's way more job postings okay so another con at least in my opinion i think web development tends to be a little bit more saturated in comparison to mobile development um so i'm going to put that as a con there and the last point i want to hit on for both is learning okay so i wouldn't say one is easier to learn over the other right because like i said if you do get into mobile development you will have to learn at least get familiar at the bare minimum with web development concepts more specifically like back end concepts at some point so because of that i would say learning is pretty equal so i'll put that as neutral for both all right so even with that all being said um to have a successful career in software development i don't think you should limit your skill set to one thing ie web or mobile i've said this in the past and i'll say it again once you learn the concepts and principles behind programming and software development you'll be able to transfer that knowledge pretty much into any application or any form of development right and i think that's something that's really important to know so if you're really struggling to pick between the two and you haven't even started learning programming yet i mean honestly just pick whichever one that seems the most fun and you can pivot at some point anyways hope you enjoyed the video uh give it a thumbs up if you did and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and let me know what you think is mobile the way to go is web the way to go do you think mobile will be taken over by web someday i hear that argument a lot personally i don't see that happening anytime soon but i'm curious to know what you think let me know in the comments again thank you so much for watching thank you for all the support i'll see in the next one [Music] now

Channel: Kenny Gunderman

Views: 82,676

Rating: 4.9502273 out of 5

Keywords: web vs mobile, software engineer, tech, top programming languages, what should you learn, learning, web, mobile, dev, algorithms, data structures

Id: bKLx4SwuumM

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020